Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World - Seth
The only other thing I've read by Seth so far is Clyde Fans Book 1, but this book has a different feel to it. He explains in the introduction that he was inspired by other cartoonists to try telling a larger story that was made up of lots of short, disconnected comic strips. It was mostly an experiment that he ended up publishing, and he apologizes that the "drawing is poor, the lettering shoddy, the page compositions and storytelling perfunctory." But it's an impressive book nonetheless, and better than a lot of comics I've seen.
The story is sort of silly, but inspired by Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness, about the wacky world of book collectors. Seth took those ideas and transported them easily to the world of comic collecting, and tells a story about the mysterious Wimbledon Green, self-proclaimed "Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World." Along the way we meet several of Green's rivals, hear stories about bidding wars, and see examples of these (fictional) comic books from Green's collection. The drawings are fairly simple and cartoony, with many panels of talking heads standing in for "interviews" with various comics experts or comic book store employees.
There's also a longer sequence that seems more like a comic book itself, with spies, trusted servants, auto-gyros, amnesia, and the like. It reminds me a little of Woody Allen's movie "Sweet and Lowdown," where a story is told by having a bunch of experts share stories about an eccentric character.
Fed to jonathan's brain | May 17, 2006
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